SOFER@BIONET-20.BIO.NET (William H. Sofer) (08/23/88)
I haven't found any one program that allows me to draw accurate and attractive plasmid maps on the Mac. But lately, I've been using two that seem to fill the bill. DNA Strider 1.0 by Christian Marck (Nucleic Acids Research 16: 1829-36 '88) is a basic DNA sequence analysis program that closely adheres to the Mac interface. It lacks some features, but it has a wonderful editing window and a very rapid restriction site search section. Strider produces reasonable circular maps that can be printed on either an ImageWriter or LaserWriter. If you want to make them look better or if they need modification (at the expense of considerably more work), I've found that Illustrator '88 works well. To get a Strider image into Illustrator you simply take a shot of the screen (hold the command and shift keys down and hit the 3 key). This makes a MacPaint image of the screen that can be brought into Illustrator. Illustrator uses the MacPaint image as a template, and it is a fairly easy matter ( but it takes some training) to copy and enhance the picture and turn it into an image that looks good on a LaserWriter. -------